I got the break-out box since that was what I could
find at Frys, my
local big box computer and electronics store. I am
poor and in a
hurry so I didn't buy all the necessary test equipment
to fully debug
this thing I just wanted lights to show me what is
happening on the
parallel port. The port acts differently for windows
vs debian-linux.

Charles says that some printers will not print
straight ASCII. This
may be true, but my experience has demostrated to me
that if you send
ASCII terminated by a form feed to an HP Deskjet it
will print. In my case
the linux system is sending but the printer isn't
listening. Probably
because some control line (like strobe) isn't behaving
properly.

The problem that I see by searching the internet is
that I seem to be
alone in this. There are probably plenty of people
printing using
their HP deskjets, laptops, and debian linux.

So I assume that some how my configuration is at
fault. Whenever I
read a document about printing it always starts with
make sure that
"echo hi > /dev/lp0" works. Well that doesn't work.